Huawei launches the Nova 5i Pro and it may just be our first look at the Mate 30 phones

The Nova 5i Pro. (Source: Weibo)

Huawei has released the new Nova 5i Pro and it bears a striking resemblance to two of the company's current flaships: the Honor View 20 and the Mate 20 Pro. Design aside, the Nova 5i Pro packs some impressive hardware and isn't excessively priced either. It also manages to give us our first look—of sorts—at the Mate 30 phones.

Yesterday, Huawei announced the launch of its latest mid-range phone, the Huawei Nova 5i Pro. The Nova 5i Pro is expected to be rebranded as the Mate 30 Lite in the coming weeks, and it shows in the camera module design the phone sports.

The Nova 5i Pro sports a 6.26-inch FHD+ LCD display. There's a punch-hole at the top left corner, much like the Honor View 20. That punch-hole plays host to a 32 MP sensor with an f/2.0 aperture.

At the back of the device is a Mate 20 Pro-esque camera module. The cameras themselves are much less impressive, though: a 48 MP Sony IMX586 with f/1.8 aperture, an 8 MP ultra-wide-angle lens, a 2 MP macro lens—like we saw on the Honor 20 phones, and a 2 MP depth sensor for bokeh. We expect the Mate 30 Pro to have a similar quad camera module, albeit with more impressive hardware packed into it

Under the hood is Huawei's new HiSilicon Kirin 810. This SoC will be used on all the company's mid-range phones this year, and that's good news since it's very capable. In fact, it's outperformed the Snapdragon 730 in some benchmarks.

There's a 4000 mAh battery supplying the device with juice, with 20 W fast charging to keep charge times down. It's said to charge from 0-50% in 30 minutes. That's not quite as good as the 22.5W SuperCharge but it's close enough that owners of the Nova 5i Pro shouldn't have any reason to complain.

I'm a freelance copywriter who lives and dies for tech. Android, ​especially. The smartphone market is one going through an impressive growth spurt, so I crawl the Internet with keen interest in a technological ecosystem that doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon.